Roving Alphabet Cameras and Zone Shooting
Roving alphabet cameras is a term I’ve been using to describe having extra cameras and operators on a scene instructed to “find their shot”. It works like this, A camera and B camera are set up as usual. The remaining cameras and operators (C, D, E, F etc.) are told to stay clear of A & B camera but to shoot from anywhere they have a good shot. I first experienced this at Shane Hurlbut’s HDSLR Bootcamp this year. We were broken into teams to shoot parts of a script that involved a lot of action sequences. The team chose a DP and a director and an A and B camera for each scene (DP and director stayed constant) and the rest of the workshop participants became roving alphabet shooters. This came about because we had so much gear available that it seemed like a waste to just stand around and watch A and B camera work.
I was surprised at how well this set up worked. There were some very creative angles captured that made it into our team film. One shooter seemed to always get a rooftop or through the rafters shot but I never noticed anyone sneaking topside during the shoots. Really cool stuff happens when you turn loose creative people with a camera.
It looks like I’m not the only one thinking about roving alphabet cameras. I came across this article where they used HDSLRs assigned zones to shoot a concert at Chicago’s House of Blues.
These kinds of shows are usually produced using traditional truck packages, big mobile production units that deploy more than half a dozen big HD cameras, a crane, lots of lights, and a large crew. This time around, however, the show’s director, Stephen Shepherd from Tailight (a Nashville-based production company), had the idea of shooting the concert with Canon HD DSLRs. Stephen didn’t want to do a traditional-style live show. He wanted something that had a lot more energy and a lot more frenetic action to it. The Canon DSLRs made this possible. They?re small and aren?t tethered to cables, so they can get up-close and into places that larger cameras can’t.
Since they weren’t using traditional shoulder, tripod, or crane-mounted HD cameras tethered to a mobile production truck (with camera operators receiving director instructions over headset intercoms), Shepherd devised a zone system for Bear and the other Canon 5D Mark II camera operators by which each would be assigned to shoot in particular areas of the stage and theater during the concert.
“We had several really great operators and all of them had shot with the 5D before, which was important,” Bear noted. “They understood that they alone were in charge of focus and exposure. Each of them got into places that a normal taped show would not have been able to get into. They could hide behind the drummer, get up next to the keyboards, or get down in the pit. Each individual operator was on his or her own, and there wasn’t anyone giving us a traditional line cut. It all went amazingly well.” – BroadcastNewsroom
These two examples show that using roving alphabet cameras and zone style shooting can leverage readily available inexpensive HDSLR cameras to radically alter production techniques. These methods can also address the shrinking job pool by creating roving camera operator jobs at a time when camera assistant positions are being lost due to the ease of use and small form factor of HDSLRs.
If you’re interested, here’s a cut of what we shot at the HDSLR Bootcamp using roving alphabet camera techniques:
